I’ve had my players try to barter for items I was trying to give them for free. This is not a bad thing, but it always throws me off-script. It’s like little Timmy coming downstairs on Christmas morning and crying out, “Sweet! Okay mom and dad, how much for the big box with ‘timmy’ on it? Huh? How much?” It doesn’t matter what you say now, the moment is ruined.

offering players freebies always confuses the hell out if us, and is one of the cruellest tricks in a DM’s arsenal; we spend the next 2 weeks just waiting for it to explode or the real owner (A dragon naturally) to turn up or…
;)
Keep ’em coming. Priceless!

Of course there were times you had to barter with us just to get us to not
take an item. Perhaps the time Thordek insisted on taking the skull full
of poison powder. The very same poison that he had just inhaled while trying to open the chest it was in.

The last panel just cracked me up, luckily the coffee cup was on the table and not at my lips. Not since “The original pervy hobbit fancier’s Journal” have I laughed so much about my favourite movies of all time.

*Wait*

OMG. I read it a third time and still laughed! Do I get a badge or something?

I tried to post a reply but it didn’t let me. Grumble. Knowing my luck, as soon as i post this one my original will magically appear. Anyway, what i wanted to say was that you either stole, killed, or bartered because anything free came with a price later on.

Celeborn speechless – that frame is perfect! I was a gonner by then; it was a challenge to compose myself enough to read the rest. Loved it!

On a side note: I see the “Categories” entry on the sidebar is showing “DM of the Rings (36)” – yet this is only strip #34. Could it be? A double-header is in the process of being uploaded? Oh, I hope, I hope – and I can’t wait!

SteveDJ: I didn’t realize that WordPress did this, but you are right, the two “extra” posts are in the future. One is today’s (Wednesday’s) and the other is Friday’s. I often write the posts themselves ahead of time (mostly my little blurb of text after the comic) and stick it in the queue to be published.

I do this with a lot of posts, actually. Right now if I dropped dead this website would keep kicking out posts until Saturday. :)

As for “free” things – I take armour plating off of beasts I’ve killed to make my own armour (that my DM boggles about costing so little when I find a leather worker),
poison sacks out of spiders for tipping my arrows with,
taken a rusty cleaver from the kitchen of a ruin (DM, it’s a big cleaver, that’s going to have a handaxe’s damage roll) – took out the next fiend with it,
and picked up stones quite often because
a) if you’re good with thrown weapons they are deadly
b) they _will_ work to distract sentries with a noise
c) if you need to keep your good stuff for later, stones is good enough.
I like to think it’s quite realistic to just pick up the oldest weapon right off the ground and clout your opponent a good one. If your initiative’s high, his head’s more than likely to be stove in. Surprise!

No matter what you offer characters, they are always looking for more rope. I’ve played games where characters have been killed for their rope, houses of NPCs have been ransacked for rope, there are few crimes that my group are not willing to commit for more rope.

Definitely in the top 5%, as are most of the strips. I didn’t realize until coming back to this one how light the panels are in this strip. Everything’s so bright and hazy and. . .Elfish. Pippin’s finest hour.

Wow, free stuff… What’s rarer is giving stuff away. We could have had a nice elfin army join us in our last session of the Red Hand Of Doom, but we sold the magic items from that black dragon. And those other big bads. Who gives away magic items?

“I've had my players try to barter for items I was trying to give them for free.”

As a first time DM running my first campaign Keep on the Shadowfell, my players (mostly first-timers to D&D) were talking to the lord of a village who was asking them to complete the campaign’s quest, basically.

Our fighter interrupted the lord before he could finish and asked for some kind of advance payment as motivation to undertake the quest, which I thought was silly but allowed nonetheless, because…

As soon as the fighter haggled his way up to 30 gold pieces in advance pay, the lord resumed talking and handed the other three players one healing potion worth 50 gold EACH.